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Test Apparatus to Increase Airbag Quality

Autoliv is a worldwide automobile safety tech-nology company. The Ogden Technical Center is a branch of Autoliv that focuses on design-ing, testing, and manufacturing airbags. Air-bags are safety restraint systems designed to evenly slow an occupant’s impact in the event of a collision. Once a collision has been de-tected, the textile cushion is rapidly inflated using combustion technology. The combus-tion process creates hot gases. Occasionally, when tested at elevated temperatures to simu-late environmental extremes, there are en-trained particles (or pieces of metal foil) that exit the gas generator and are projected into the airbag. Small burn holes in the airbag fabric can result. Autoliv has a no-burn-hole policy and wants to system-atically investigate what particle sizes, velocities, and temperatures cre-ate holes in airbag fabric.

Team 3 designed a test stand that would propel particles ranging in size from 1-7 mm at velocities from 20 -240 feet per second using com-pressed air. Elevated temperatures (300-1350 K) were reached by run-ning the barrel of the particle accelerator through the oven. When the particle was loaded, it was located in the center of the oven, where it was allowed to reach the desired temperature. The particle was then fired into the enclosure at airbag fabric.

This test fixture is the only known simulator to test the entrained particle phenomenon in the world, and will allow Autoliv to test and design state-of-the-art fabrics and inflators.